That is how I felt tonight. I worked and the elbows and shoulder were ready to go out. I made it to the sheriff's. Waiting for the bus, I felt myself lock up like an engine without oil.
I did not go to get my CPAP water. I will do that tomorrow - no, must do that tomorrow.
Hummus was dinner, as I am fasting tonight. Coating my aching parts with Ben-Gay, I sat down at the computer.
I read The new Turing test: Are you human?, Preventing wildfire with the Wild Horse Fire Brigade, and
To Name It Now Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee occupies a savage abyss:
Recently, inspired by Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning’s nod towards Cha, her success as a groundbreaking experimental literary, cinematic, and artistic figure is renewed, reincarnated, or re-exposed. Mayukh Sen noted in his 2020 retrospective review of Dictee for The Nation that, after the magnificent publication of her bold Dictee, “The book signaled a step forward for her. It was, instead, her final act.” From a patriarchal, colonial, theatrical narrative, Sen’s reduction of Cha’s work is predictable and linear, but not attuned to Cha’s own dynamic trajectories, in both art and in life. Her publication of Dictee was far from her final act. It was one of her ghosts moving forward into time with us. It’s true that a week after the birth of her now-famous novel, Cha was raped and killed by Joey Sanza, but there is nothing final about her book or her existence. Indifferent to the technical age, her life continues to be profound, in conversation with the #MeToo movement, with the Atlanta Spa shooter.
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Cha must have understood the importance of documentation, of writing, of recording in order to stymie violence. She writes, “You write. You write you speak voices hidden masked you plant words to the moon you send word through the wind. Through the passing of seasons.” If the world hadn’t entombed her work for forty years and preserved its profound relevancy, perhaps we could stop “pain from translating itself into memory” where it revisits us like lost, disembodied ghosts. I had imagined Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as the Korean Persephone, who had been raped by the security guard, Hades. I had imagined Hades fleeing from his Florida escapade to avoid his convictions for his serial rape. And, half of the year, Cha is gone from us, where the mother in all of us, that Korean Demeter in us, roams the contemporary world of experimental literature seeking her vengeance and triumph.
(A gut punch of an essay review, worth reading even if you are not working your way around writing an American novel.), and
We Mean Nothing to the Company
“The workplace in the United States has always been one of the most oppressive, authoritarian, undemocratic . . . institutions in American society,” Robin told me. That may be why many of us don’t think about democracy as applying to the workplace at all: for most, the concept means more or less the right to vote for people in one of two parties. But democracy also means having a say in the power structures that govern our lives, employment among them.
Until somewhat recently, the American workplace was in many ways “a feudal institution,” Robin said, governed by medieval common law. In the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries, workers were barred from quitting unless they had proof of another job. They couldn’t get a new job without a testimonial from their previous employers. Vagrancy laws were aggressively enforced against people without work. These rules were given to judges, who tended to side with the interests of capital, to enforce, and workers’ rights were left up to their whims, particularly when the courts kept striking down lawmakers’ regulations. For instance, the Supreme Court deemed multiple laws banning “yellow-dog contracts”—which barred workers from joining unions—unconstitutional. This was the situation for supposedly free workers; the country was, of course, founded on the labor of slaves.
The Wagner Act of 1935 injected some democracy into the workplace, not just by paving a legal path toward unionization, which gave employees a literal voice on the job but also by successfully withstanding judicial scrutiny and finally giving elected lawmakers a say. The labor movement swelled in its wake.
But then Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which narrowed who is covered by the Wagner Act, banned things like secondary boycotts and solidarity strikes, and allowed states more control over labor law—leading nearly thirty states to adopt right-to-work laws that hobble unions by allowing individual workers to opt out. While the labor movement reached 35 percent of all workers by 1960, the militancy of the 1930s faded away, and ever since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, the movement has been in significant retreat. The number of American workers in unions has steadily fallen, such that the union membership rate in 2021 was only about 10 percent. Our labor laws are exceedingly undemocratic: a 2005 analysis by economist Gordon Lafer found that American labor laws governing union elections fail our country’s own standards for free and fair elections.
It is 7:07, and I am going to take a shower.
7:52, and I am starting on submissions.
"Problem Solving" went out to:
I passed on New Sinews, as too obviously experimental. Others I put off to the future.
It is 9:25. I should go down to McClure's, but it is late. I should write some more letters, and that is not any more likely. Furthermore, I have a draft post that will have to wait.
Yeah, time for bed, so I can get up early.
I may go see a movie tomorrow.
sch
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